College Campuses Are Covid-19 Superspreaders, Study Says
College campuses are at risk of becoming Covid-19 superspreaders, according to a new study.
The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering, looked at 30 campuses across the country with the highest amount of reported cases.
Researchers observed that more than half the institutions had spikes of more than 1,000 Covid-19 cases per 100,000 people per week in the first two weeks of class.
By the end of the fall semester, in some colleges, as many 1 in 5 students were Covid-19 positive, with four campuses reporting more than 5,000 cases.
"The number of students who had become infected just throughout the fall is more than twice of the national average since the beginning of the outbreak of 5.3%, with 17.3 million reported cases at a population of 328.2 million,” said lead author Hannah Lu, from Stanford's Energy Resources Engineering program.
"At the University of Notre Dame, for instance, all 12,607 students were tested before the beginning of class and only nine had tested positive. Less than two weeks into the term, the seven-day incidence was 3083, with a reproduction number R0 of 3.29.”
The incidence levels of 1,000 cases per 100,000 people per week - when compared to the first and second waves of the pandemic with peak incidences of 70 to 150 - means colleges are at real risk of developing an extreme incidence of Covid-19.
"Policy makers often use an incidence of 50 Covid-19 cases per 100,000 people per week as a threshold for high risk counties, states, or countries. All 30 institutions in our study exceeded this value," added Lu.
But a limitation of this study is that the true on-campus student population was often unreported and had to be approximated by the total fall quarter enrolment.
“This likely underestimates of the real maximum incidence and the fraction of on-campus students that have been affected by the virus,” the authors write in the paper.
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